From 1992 until it was sold in 1996 I
ran an internet service provider (ISP) called The Little Garden,
later TLGnet, Inc. I had four other partners of varying degrees of
involvement.

TLG started in 1992 as a "share" of a
then-arcane and expensive internet connection between three pioneer
businesses; more detail is available here.
In 1992 the Internet was still crawling out from under the ARPAnet
entanglements, and was not quite commercial. TLG was a business
formed out of need; in hindsight, the cart before the
horse.

TLG started in this primordial time
without business plan, money, or really, any plan at all. That
changed rather quickly and by 1994 we were caught up in the
commercial-internet undertow and on our way to being a serious
regional player.

From zero cash flow in 1992 it grew to
over $125,000.00 per month when we sold TLG to Best Internet
Communications (now part of Verio). Obviously I had help --
substantial, indispensible talent: employees, mainly Edgar Nielsen
and Deke Nihilson and the crew we hired and trained -- but I
remained chief business and network architect from start to
finish.

It's safe to say that Little
Garden/TLG would not have been more than a blip on the map without
the help of Randy Bush. Though he wasn't part of TLG in any direct
way, he'd been a friend of mine for some time already (having done
the RFC-like state machine documentation for the FidoNet protocol
and set the standard for that protocol's success) and besides
giving me invaluable advice on network technical stuff, as part of
the Rainy-Garden (rg.net) consortium? got Little Garden it's first
"real" connection to the net, after Rick Adams kicked us off
Alternet (the infamous "find yourself another service provider"
remark after an argument with John Gilmore) via Sprint Government
Systems Division. (In 1993 the internet the "commercial vs.
research" split use of resources was ending.) A real
T1!

From then on, from Randy I learned:
routing via BGP, policy routing, policy databases, peerage (and got
us peers at MAE-WEST and elsewhere), at his continual poking we did
NACRs and DNS and WHOIS right.

From dba to
Inc
TLG existed in three stages; prehistory, d/b/a, and TLGnet, Inc.
Prehistory is socially complex and business simple; read about it
elsewhere. Essentially, it was a means to
share an expensive 'net connection amongst some savvy users. The
idea of TLG-as-business was thrust upon us externally.

The d/b/a phase (1993-1995): TLG
started out, business-wise, as a d/b/a of Tom Jennings. During the
build-up phase I relied on our existing, loyal and
socially-coherent customer base as a source for operating and
startup cash, to incrementally build our infrastructure. I was
essentially the only day-to-day talent, but I had substantial
technical support from certain "customers" (eg. Stu Grossman). Our
business plan was set by the end of 1993, and at that time very
radical in its goals and approach -- briefly,

Essentially, other ISPs restricted use and resale of
their connections, in a sort of zero-sum approach. By concentrating
on bulk connectivity we at once created a market for our customers
to provide the vertical services we didn't want or couldn't afford
to provide, and built a hard-to-beat solid rep that for a long
while locked out direct competitors to our core business; having
our prices online and breaking down the leased-line costs and
equipment gave us a major one-up economically, technically, and in
credible reputation over nearly all other ISPs, big or small.

TLG was run on QuickBooks. I kept tight control over
invoicing and expenses from the start. In 1994 I hired two
employees (soon made minority partners), Deke Nihilson (jack of all
trades) and Edgar Nielsen (network architect and heavy sysadmin).
Payroll was done in-house (foolishness!). By the end of 1994 TLG
grossed about $10,000/month.

We were profitable from the start. We paid off a
private $10,000 loan in a year, as we built the network, solely
from operating cash.

By 1995 we had a 24/7 network operations center (NOC),
by 1996 every node in the network was SNMP monitored. We had about
2000 Class C addresses (the coin of the realm), we had automated
DNS in 1995, a complete database of every customer, service and
network interface from which we generated router code and
logins. We were purchased by Best for our income and our NOC (still
pretty nifty by 1999 standards).

Last but not least, we created our own talent -- we
hired smart and hard-working people without skills -- sometimes
with no computer skills at all -- and brought them up to speed
within a year. Not only did we get relatively inexpensive and
dedicated talent, we got to give back to the local community, too.
Almost without exception all are now "in the industry" at
competitive salaries, and actual skills.